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Intel i965 Gallium3D Driver In Standstill

Phoronix: Intel i965 Gallium3D Driver In Standstill

Back in December a new Intel Gallium3D driver was announced that supported the Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge graphics processors under a completely new driver architecture than the current i965 "classic" Mesa DRI driver...

I know that Gallium is kind of the baby of the FOSS world...but in this case who cares? The nice part about Gallium is that it decreases the workload on developers. And when you have a limited number of random contributors (ex: radeon and nouveau) that's a great boon. But this is Intel. Intel has what? 20 paid devs working on the Intel driver? Devs that KNOW the hardware and aren't reverse engineering it. Let them make their highly optimized, highly specific driver. They've got the knowledge to do it, they don't need Gallium's benefits because they don't have a shortage of knowledgeable developers.

Not sad at all

I'd like to see Intel support gallium, but it's kind of insane to be rooting for an unsupported i965 driver to go against the Intel backed official one.

Without those 20 intel devs working on it, there's no way it would ever be able to catch up with the official one, and there's not much point to having 2 drivers for the same hardware if one is going to be far less than the other.

The i915 driver is different, in that the "official" one from Intel is largely unsupported, at least with new work, and the gallium driver had some real support from Google in order to make it competitive.

I know that Gallium is kind of the baby of the FOSS world...but in this case who cares? The nice part about Gallium is that it decreases the workload on developers. And when you have a limited number of random contributors (ex: radeon and nouveau) that's a great boon. But this is Intel. Intel has what? 20 paid devs working on the Intel driver? Devs that KNOW the hardware and aren't reverse engineering it. Let them make their highly optimized, highly specific driver. They've got the knowledge to do it, they don't need Gallium's benefits because they don't have a shortage of knowledgeable developers.

IIRC, they don't use Gallium because they don't want to rewrite their driver from scratch. They are also a little bit worried about the CPU overhead of Mesa+Gallium, but there is no proof the difference between a classic and Gallium driver would be measurable if they had both. Other than that, Gallium has only benefits.